When building an incident response process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In this article, you’ll learn how to build a strong incident response process.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. When building an incident response process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving parts. Less is more: focus first on building solid foundations that you can develop over time. Here are three things we think form a key part of a strong process. I’d recommend taking these one at a time, introducing incident response throughout your organization. This is, in the words of Julie Andrews, a very good place to start. Getting a common understanding of what an incident is (and isn’t) is the first step in bringing people into your incident response process. An incident is where something unexpected happens that has (or might have) a negative consequence. If you’re interested in reading more, we’ve dedicated a whole blog post to this question. Particularly when you’re getting started, the best way to embed a process into your organization is to use it, a lot. This also helps everyone learn the process, and get better at incident response overall, meaning that when something really bad happens it feels like a well-oiled machine. To this end, you want a broad and inclusive definition of an incident: Transparency by default is a really important value to bake into your incident process.